This video is sponsored by Motion Array. If you're one of the many people who are considering switching from Adobe to DaVinci Resolve, but you're holding off because the switch from After Effects to Fusion just seems too hard, well, you're in luck. The people over at Blackmagic Design just made it a lot easier to make the switch. And to prove it, I'm going to show you step by step how I just created this little motion animated graphic thing using a brand new tool in DaVinci Resolve 18.5. Let's get started. All right, we're in the edit page in DaVinci Resolve. And the reason why we're in the edit page is because before we can do anything in Fusion, we need to create either a new Fusion composition or a new Fusion clip. Now, a new Fusion clip can be created by clicking on an image in our timeline, but we do not have an image in our timeline. So we're starting from scratch. Let's come over into our effects library, which is over here. If you don't see your effects library, you can turn that on and off by clicking effects right up here. And we're going to come down into the effects category. You'll see Fusion composition, and we can just drag that into our timeline, select that, make sure our play heads at the beginning and come down and go into the Fusion page. Now, I've already done a video where I kind of went into more detail about our Fusion page and how it's laid out. But if this is your first time in Fusion, let me just do a quick tour. Over here we've got our effects library. Again, you can turn that on and off right here. You can also turn on your media pool if you wanted to see the different media that you have in your project. You can also turn on your clips and your node graph. We've got our left preview monitor and our right preview monitor. If you only wanted one preview monitor, you could come up here, you could select this little icon, and that will make it one single preview monitor. But we're going to stick with two. We're also going to turn our effects library back on. Over here to the right we've got our inspector. This is where we will be modifying the settings of any node that we choose. We don't have any nodes selected right now, so that's why it's blank. Below our preview monitors, we've got our toolbar. This is a bunch of widely used, commonly used tools in Fusion. They're located right here for your convenience. We will be using them a lot in this video. And then below your toolbar, you've got your node graph. Now currently in our node graph, all we have is media out. This is what sends our composition back to the edit page so we can view it in our final video. So let's go ahead and drag that over here so we have some more room to work with. And the first thing we want to do is add a background to our composition. So let's go into our toolbar, and this is our background icon right here. So we'll select that. It will add a background to our composition. And in order to see it, we will just connect it to media out. And now you can see we've got a solid black background, which is not exactly what we want. So we'll make sure background is selected. We'll come into our inspector and we'll choose type gradient. And now we've got our black to white gradient, but we want to change that, make it a little bit more comfortable. So we can go over here, choose our first color, and we're going to make that blue. Hit OK. And we'll come in, choose our second color, select the triangle, select the color, and we'll make that purple. And then we'll hit OK. Now real quick, before we get into this super cool new tool that DaVinci Resolve 18.5 has added, let me show you the old way of compositing, which honestly was still pretty simple. Not as simple as it is now, but still pretty simple. Let's say I wanted to put a circle on top of my background. What I could do is I could come in to my toolbar. We can add another black background to our composition, to our node graph. And we need to find a way to place this background on top of this background. What we can do is simply drag from the output of background two to the output of background one. And that is going to add a merge node. What a merge node does is say, hey, Resolve, place this element on top of this element. We are now working basically with layers. I did a whole video about this. I will have it linked in the description along with the playlist of all my Fusion tutorials. But that is the basics of compositing. You are using merge nodes to place things on top of other things. Now to turn this background into a circle, what we need is a mask. And what we're going to do is come in to our little spline section right here in our toolbar. We've got rectangle, ellipse, polygon, and B-spline. We're going to use an ellipse mask. So let's go ahead and select background two, because that's what we're turning into a circle. And we'll select ellipse, and that will add a mask to the mask effect input or effect mask input of our background. And if we zoom out and look at our preview monitor, we've got a black circle. And again, if we wanted, we could select our background and we can come in here and we can change the color, let's say to red and hit OK. So that's pretty simple. But the problem is if we wanted to add something else, maybe we wanted to add a triangle on top of this circle, we have to add yet another merge node. So let's go ahead and we'll grab another background and we'll drag the output of background three on top of the output of merge one. And it will add yet another merge node. And then from there, we can select background three, we can add a polygon mask, and we can come up and draw our little triangle. So not a very good triangle, but it's a triangle. We'll change the color of this background, let's say to yellow, and we'll click OK. So the concept is simple. Every time you want to place something on top of something else, you use a merge node. But if you needed to adjust the positioning of a layer, you would have to find the merge node associated with that layer and you could change the size or you could change the alpha gain or the blends and all of that. And you've just got a ton of nodes to work with. And that was the old way of compositing. And right now, that wouldn't be that big of a deal. We've only got two merge nodes. We've only got a couple of shapes. It's not that big of a deal. But if it became like a huge composition, you could end up with a ton of merge nodes. So now let's take a look at the new way to composite in fusion, the easier way to composite in fusion. We're going to keep our circle composition. We're going to keep our triangle, but we're going to delete these merge nodes because we don't need them anymore. What we're going to do is hit shift space on our keyboard and we're going to type in multi, M-U-L-T-I, and if we come up here, you'll see multi merge. This is the brand new tool that I have been telling you about. We'll select multi merge. We'll come down. We'll click add. And now you can see we've got a multi merge node in our composition. Now multi merge node works kind of like a regular merge node with one distinct difference. If I came over here, this is my little circle right here and I connected that there and we look at our composition. Once again, we have our circle, but now I can take my triangle here and I can connect that to the same merge node. And now I've got my triangle and that's what multi merge does. It allows you to connect multiple layers, multiple, we'll call them sub compositions to a single merge node. And it gets better. If we select this merge node, this multi merge, and we come up into our inspector, what we'll find is that we now have a layer list. So now we're essentially working in a layer based workflow inside of a node based workflow. Pretty cool, right? And real quick, do you see how this little pipeline is glowing? That's because layer one is selected. So we know that layer one is our circle. If we double click on the name, we can label it circle, which would make layer two triangle. And if I wanted, I could reorder these layers. Let's say I wanted triangle to be below the circle. I could do that. Let's say I wanted to make the circle smaller. I could come down and I could bring the size down. I could come over and I could reposition the circle. I could reposition the triangle by selecting triangle from over here. So there's a lot that you can do just within that single multi merge node. But for now, let's go ahead and put everything back the way it was. I'm going to circle down below the triangle. There we go. So I can connect a whole bunch of stuff to this multi merge node. I could also mask out this merge node. Let's say I wanted to kind of do an animated mask using fast noise. What I could do is I could come in here, grab my fast noise node, bring it down into our composition. We'll connect it with the effect mask input right here. Now you can see we've got our kind of a little bit more blended. I could bring up the seed rate of my fast noise. And now if we play this composition back, we've kind of got this moving, almost looks like purple clouds, but just changing the opacity a little bit of that layer. All right. Let's stop the playback. We'll go back to the beginning of the composition. And the next thing that I want to do is I kind of, I just want to grab, I want to make this triangle and this circle glow a little bit. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select my multi merge. I'm going to hit shift space on my keyboard. We're going to search for glow. And if I could spell, that would be great. Here's my glow effect. We'll add that to the composition. And now everything below or before this glow is glowing. And you don't need to only use one multi merge in a composition. Let's say I wanted to create a new set of little sub compositions. We'll call them sub compositions because that's the only word I can come up with. Maybe I wanted another set of those that aren't going to be affected by the glow. I could do that by selecting the glow, hitting shift space, and we'll look for multi merge again. There's our multi merge, click add. And now we've got a new multi merge and we can start creating a new group of assets. Now what I'm going for here is kind of like a late eighties, early nineties vibe. And for that, I'm going to need an asset that we don't have natively in DaVinci Resolve. So we're going to check out today's sponsor, motion array. And if you've never heard of motion array or you've never been to motion array, this is it right here. It's got a ton of video editing assets that you can use to complete your projects. They've got templates and presets, motion graphics, plugins, royalty free music, sound effects videos, you name it. They've got all of the things and they've got it for not only DaVinci Resolve, but they've also got premiere pro after effects, final cut, all sorts of stuff. Now here's what we're looking for. We're looking for a macro. So we're going to come into presets. We're going to go into DaVinci Resolve macros. And here we go. And motion array is super easy to use. All you have to do is click what you want to use. In this case, overlays. You want to click the version that you're looking for. So we're looking for DaVinci Resolve 18, and we will get updated with all sorts of overlays that we can use for our project. For example, we've got the CRT TV effects. Let's click on that. And there we go. We can see a little preview that's actually perfect. So what we can do is click download and we're good to go. Motion array has a bunch of other stuff too, like plugins for premiere pro and some really cool tools like a video collaboration platform that you can brand. It's white labels. So you can more professionally share videos with collaborators or brands or clients or whoever. They've got a portfolio builder. So if you're looking to build a portfolio, you can make your own website. How cool is that? So if you're looking for a huge supply of templates and presets and titles and whatever you need to create your video editing projects, click the link in the description, check out motion array today. And now that we have what we want, let's head back to DaVinci Resolve. Now, before we add our CRT effect that we just downloaded from motion array, we want to add a couple 3D shapes. I'm thinking some red animated 3D cubes, maybe up in this corner and up in this corner. Now I just did a whole video about creating 3D shapes in DaVinci Resolve. So we're not going to go into detail about that now. I'm just going to blow through it real quick. We're going to add a 3D shape, a 3D merge, a camera, a spotlight, and a 3D renderer node. Now we've got our nice little rotating cube. Let's go ahead and connect that to our multi-merge. There we go. We're just going to copy this whole group here. We're going to connect that to our multi-merge. Now we've got two cubes and if we select our multi-merge and come in here, we can select layer one and we can move that up to the top right. We can select layer two, move that down to the bottom left. No, top left, bottom right. Man, I'm having a day. And we'll go ahead and play our composition. And now we've got two little floating rotating cubes in our composition. If we wanted to make that look a little bit more natural, we could go into multi-merge. We can hit settings. We can go to motion blur and we can go quality five and we'll have, once this renders out a little bit more, a little bit smoother motion. And now it's time to add our CRT effect. Now I already went ahead and installed this in DaVinci Resolve. It was super, super easy to install. We just need to come down to templates, fusion, CRT, CRT TV effects lines. Let's go ahead and bring that into our composition. We will connect that up with our multi-merge. And there we go. We've got some nice little CRT effect lines. If we play that back, there we go. Now this is coming on a little bit strong. So once again, we'll select our multi-merge. We'll make sure that layer three is selected. That is our CRT lines. And we can bring our blend down a little bit. That's looking good. Now we are getting pretty, we've got a lot of stuff going in this composition. So let's take a break from actually adding things to our composition and let's get organized a little bit. I'm going to spread things out. So we've got a lot of room to work with here. And we will grab these nodes here. That was our circle and triangle and our glow effect. And we'll just bring everything in close. Now there's two ways that we could organize here. We could either group these all together or we could just add an underlay, which is what we're going to do. So let's select all of these nodes here and we'll hit shift space on our keyboard. We'll search for under and we'll find underlay. Click add. And now we can underlay. We can change the name of our underlay to circle dash triangle. Okay. And now if we look at our underlay, we've got circle triangle and here's all the nodes that were associated with that. And if I move this underlay around, all the nodes come with it. Also apparently I don't know how to spell circle. Now let's see if we can get this looking a little bit prettier. I don't know if we can, but we can try. Let's say if we move these over here, got our render, got our merge, we've got spotlight, camera, shape. We can do the same thing over here. Render merge, spotlight, camera, shape, and our CRT effect. Select those, shift space, find our underlay, add and rename that to 3D CRT. Hit okay. There we go. We've got our circle triangle and we've got our 3D CRT. And by doing this, we can actually kind of take a look at how fusion works differently than after effects. If we come in here, cause in after effects, pre comps are a big thing. If we come in here, we could see, we can consider all of this stuff that's connected to this multi-merge as one pre comp. Then we can come over here and all of this stuff connected to this multi-merge is another pre comp. And the compositions don't really exist within fusion. Instead, you have merge nodes. Every single merge node you can consider as a pre comp. Now, the last thing that I want to do is I want to add some text. So what we'll do is we'll actually just use a regular merge node. So let's grab a merge node from our toolbar. We'll bring that in. Let's go ahead and break this. We'll go from the output of our multi-merge to the input of our merge node and merge to media out. And we will grab a text node. That's this little T right here. We'll drag that onto our composition, connect that to our merge. Now let's go ahead and create our text. We'll just say thanks for watching. And since this is text plus, we can do a lot of stuff with it. So we'll select it. We'll come into the inspector and let's go ahead and come over to shading. Come into shading. We can do a bunch of stuff. We can turn on an outline if we wanted. We don't want an outline, but we will do a black shadow. So we'll just enable black shadow. Boom. There you go. Maybe we will do an outline. Why not? Let's go ahead. We'll do red outline. We'll change it to black and we'll change the color to black. Okay. Come into transform. We'll bring up the size. There we go. Come back into text. We're going to do a little bit of a write on effect. So let's come back to the beginning of our composition. We come down here to where it says write on. Go all the way down. You'll see our text has disappeared. We'll keyframe that. We'll move forward. Let's say 12 frames. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. And we'll increase this. There we go. Now if we play that back, you'll see we've got a nice little animated text here. Really, really simple. And that's looking pretty good. Last thing I want to do is bring down the brightness of everything behind this text. That's why I used a new merge node instead of adding it to the same multi-merge. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select my second multi-merge. I'm going to come into my toolbar. I'm going to find my color corrector node. I'm going to select that. That is going to add a color corrector node to our composition. And we can just select that. Come in, grab the brightness, bring that down a little bit. And if we play that back, here's our final composition. Multi-merge is just one of a whole bunch of new tools in DaVinci Resolve 18.5. And I want to make tutorials on all of it. I don't know where to start, so I need your help. In the comments, let me know what tools you want to see me make videos on. Then, for a list of things that you need to do when switching to DaVinci Resolve, check out this video right here. And until next time, don't forget to go out and make stuff. Thanks for watching.
